How One Woman Discovered the Powerful Link Between Sex and Self-Esteem

An ode to the lover who taught me to love my body.

By
Pam Houston

Jan 31, 2016

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I am in London, on book business, when I have the good fortune to meet a twenty-five-year-old Welshwoman named Hannah, with whom I became immediate friends. She is smart and honest, warm, and more than just a little wild. Her eyes are full of a wisdom she hasn't discovered, and laughter tumbles from her mouth and fills the air around her, charges it with an energy I can almost see. She is beautiful: She has ivory skin and big dark circles and lots of long curly hair wrapped around her shoulders. Hannah brims with life, seethes with sensuality; she moves her body with an impeccable combination of grace and power. No one can walk past her on the street without seeing it, without trying to get near it, to appropriate it somehow.

In a few hours, in cafés and office buildings and the back of taxicabs, we have exchanged the stories of our lives. She tells me about her first orgasm, which is surprisingly recent. About the man who has made her universe explode sexually, intellectually, every way it can. She tells me how she's been startled by the strength of her passion, frightened by the intensity of her desire, nervous that the changes in her mind and her body have come at the hands of a man.

"I feel like I've been reborn," she says. "Being alive has a whole new meaning. But it's also like I'm riding a huge and headstrong horse across an infinite plain. There's no control here. There's not even the illusion of control."

I tell her I believe that passion is uncontrollable by definition, that she'd never have experienced its freedom if she hadn't been willing first to surrender herself. That her passion is something not outside but inside of her, that it is not something to fear or control but to recognize as an unparalleled source of strength.

I am able to say all these things with something like confidence because I too have met a man recently— let's call him X— who adores and indulges and honors my body. For the first time in my life I feel perfectly sexy, perfectly sensual, perfectly free.

If you asked me, when I was twenty-five, to discuss my sensuality, my answer would have been a jumbled assembly line of body parts, pro and con. I would have talked about my good features, which are, in descending order, my calves, my collarbone, my feet, and breasts; my neutral features— my back, my waist, my thighs, and forearms; and the parts that work against me— my hips, my stomach, and my upper arms. My face and hair, I would have to say, generally work in my favor, though my cheekbones aren't high enough, my forehead is too high, and I have lately developed just the hint of a double chin.

It suddenly seemed I'd been overly grateful to too many of my former partners and much too quick to apologize.

If you had asked me, at twenty-five, to talk about my sexual power, I think I would have said I didn't have any. I was with a different man then, a man who took me to the Alaskan wilderness for the first time. He taught me to spot white Dall sheep against snow-covered cornices by waiting until their heads moved and their horns flashed in the sun. He showed me how the glaciers make weather, how to make sourdough and wild-blueberry pancakes, how you wake up one fall morning to find the whole Arctic tundra has turned from green to gold. He taught me how to stay out of the way of the grizzly bears, how to watch for them, to listen, to smell for the trace of their musk on the air.

That man hardly noticed my body, but the Alaskan wilderness gave me my first real lesson in the equations of desire. I wanted to know that wild country like nothing I had ever known before. And so I gave myself to it, scouring its mountainsides, crossing its glacial rivers, getting snowed on, sunburned, deluged, blown by its wind.

It is not, I can see, unlike the places X takes me, only now the landscape is my body, with all its seasons and storms and floods. And X worships it, as I worshipped the wilderness, wanting every inch of it, its every nuance, its every shade. Under his hands my body becomes magnificent, precious, every move I make full of the grace of a glacial river, every word I speak full of the blind confidence of a wild animal in heat. Even more important, X has made me understand that my sexuality has very little to do with the shape of my body, that at the center of my sexual being are so many things I've never imagined: the sound of my voice, the way I use language, my love for animals and wild places, in fact; the way I look the world, and him, in the eye.

X treasures me absolutely, and I give myself entirely. And though I've never jumped from an airplane, it must be a similar feeling: the initial terror giving way to pleasure as your parachute opens and all the air around you goes soft. I am learning, with X, the language of desire, a language that is written across my breasts and spoken from the insides of my thighs. It is a language I was deaf to all those years I tried to ignore my body, all those years I spent looking selectively into the mirror, seeing only pieces and never a passionate whole.

Now in the mirror I see a glow not unlike Hannah's. It has become easy for me to recognize it in other women. It is possible that we even give off some kind of scent.

"Look," I tell X, as we walk on the beach or through the open markets, "that woman's got a man at home who thinks she's the bitter end."

One day X and I were driving down the highway from Oakland to Fresno, and he said, "You know, if you wanted to, you could get laid by a different guy every night of the week."

I stared at the hot bugs accumulating on the windshield. This was not a possibility I had ever pondered before. I used to believe all I needed to do any time I wanted a date was lose fifteen pounds. X was showing me there were other possible formulas. Find one man who loves your body deeply and thoroughly, and every third man you pass on the street will want you. You, of course, have neither the time nor the stamina to think twice about them.

But I was excited. Not at the prospect of getting laid each week by seven strangers, but by the realization that I had just entered a universe where people wanted to have sex with me not in spite of... but because of... It suddenly seemed I'd been overly grateful to too many of my former partners and much too quick to apologize.

And, sure, there's a part of me that wishes I had figured all this out on my own, the same way I learned, at thirty, that it is really okay to buy myself flowers. But there's another, more honest part of me that knows that we are put on the earth to dance together, and the fact that this gift has come from another person makes it more valuable, rather than less.

It didn't take long— maybe because he felt so sure I could get laid every night of the week— for X to try to convince me that he was wrong, that I was in fact perfectly undesirable. His passion gave in to fear and the parachute didn't open. He needed to take back what he'd given, and he nearly succeeded.

Nearly.

But his withholding turned out to be one more part of the gift. Because it was only when I felt X try to deny me my desirability that I understood how much of it was and always had been mine. As when I was twenty-five and the man who took me to Alaska fell in love with someone else and I thought for one desperate moment that I'd never see those mountains again. But of course I did, and I can; they are there whenever I need them.

Sometimes after X and I made love, and I was silly, satiated, and amazed at my newly discovered abandon, I'd try to thank him for the freedom, for the power he'd made me feel, but he always stopped me. "It's nothing I did," he said. "There is nothing I gave you. I was just lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time."

He can say that again.

And whatever combination of me and him and fate and timing led to my fluency in this rich new language, led to the exhilaration with which I now face the world, I am deeply grateful for it, and irrevocably strong.

"So," Hannah wants to know, "do you do it with the lights on?"

"Yeah," I say, "and I don't even think about it. Get this: I don't even hold my stomach in."

"Okay," she says, "but here's the real acid test: Do you get up and walk around? In the morning, I mean, naked. In the very light of day?"

I look at Hannah's perfect body. I think about my own, so much less so, and yet...

"I do," I say. "I walk around naked in the morning."

"I could never do that," she says. "Not with this body, not in a million years."

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